Call for applications: Innovation York and NRC-IRAP’s Artificial Intelligence Industry Partnership Fund
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Innovation York and the National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) are offering a fifth round of the Artificial Intelligence Industry Partnership Fund program to support artificial intelligence (AI) collaborative research projects for industry and York University researchers.
This is a unique opportunity for faculty members and their students to work with innovative companies to execute industry-driven research projects in Artificial Intelligence. Students will have the opportunity to apply their knowledge and technologies to real-world situations and employ their research to further extend the knowledge base within AI. The research project must be jointly supervised by the faculty member and the industry partner, with the work being performed by Masters, PhD or PostDoc.
Faculty members are encouraged to use the funding to initiate a new partnership or continue the support provided to their industry partners. For small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that have not pre-identified a research partner, Innovation York will work to find an appropriate faculty member partner.
Applicants: Canadian SMEs that are (or will be) partnered with York faculty members. The industry partner must be in business for a minimum of one year and have assigned NRC IRAP industrial technology advisor (ITA).
Application Deadline: June 15 by 4 p.m. EST.
Funding Amount: Up to $12,000 per selected research project (no funding to industry partners; no funding required of industry partners).
Project Length: Two to four months.
Use of Funds: To execute industry-driven research projects in AI. The funds can only be used towards student stipends. Travel, living expenses and seminar costs are ineligible.
For those requiring assistance finding a partner, contact Rachel Sung, Mitacs specialist, at rsung@yorku.ca, as soon as possible.
Knowledge Mobilization Unit is available to assist and support researchers
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During this global pandemic there has been an increased demand for leading experts at York University to help inform the public, health practitioners and policy makers with research relevant to COVID-19. To help make this research relevant and understandable, knowledge mobilization is more important than ever. Knowledge mobilization is defined as making research relevant to society, and this work is done purposefully.
Innovation York’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit is available to help support researchers with strategies and tools to help mobilize their research. Michael Johnny and Krista Jensen, staff within the Knowledge Mobilization Unit offer the following tips for researchers seeking to mobilize their knowledge:
Communicate in clear language
There are multiple audiences, including the public, who are keen to access relevant information to help inform decisions around public health. Clear communication is vital in conveying messages about your research. Be concise in sharing relevant messages. Where appropriate, keep your messages actionable. Before people can act on your research, they need to understand it. The best tip these days – pretend you are communicating your research to your grandmother.
Consider how audiences like to access information
Here, we can look to research project teams and see excellent examples of how they are mobilizing their research during the pandemic:
Boredom Lab: Clinical psychologist, John Eastwood has seen increased interest in his research since the onset of this pandemic. His team has translated research findings into infographics to help engage and inform the public around boredom, including strategies for coping with self-isolation.
Homeless Hub: Canada’s leading homelessness researcher, Stephen Gaetz (Education) uses collaborative partnerships to help inform knowledge mobilization efforts. His team uses knowledge mobilization tools like social media and research summaries (among others) to help share key messages with the public and key decision makers. They have developed specific resources for the sector related to COVID-19.
Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research: Dahdaleh Distinguished Chair, Steven Hoffman has become even busier these days. Media engagement is woven into Steven’s daily calendar, and he presents key messages with clarity to help educate and inform the public. Recently, their team has completed development of a Global Health Portal, specific to COVID-19
Be aware of your goals
Regardless of the knowledge mobilization tools you use, researchers should be aware of the goals of their knowledge mobilization efforts. There are three overarching goals for consideration: to generate awareness, to inform policy decisions and practice, or to impart tools and new knowledge. Your knowledge mobilization efforts should align to these goals, in addition to considering how your audiences like to access information.
The Knowledge Mobilization Unit is available to help researchers tailor a plan and develop knowledge mobilization products to help ensure their research can have its greatest impact.
York University announces funding for new COVID-19 research projects
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An image of the COVID-19 virus that was created by the Centers for Disease Control in the United States
York University has awarded $300,000 in research grants to advance 20 new research projects dedicated to Canada’s fight against COVID-19 and its impacts. The University recently announced a $250,000 research fund and call for proposals to support immediate term COVID-19 research projects. Due to the impressive response, the University increased the fund by $50,000 to support the further development of additional high-potential projects.
York researchers will undertake 10 new projects related to COVID-19 over the next year with special funding of more than $250,000 from the University. Researchers will study the human and public health impacts of the pandemic with a broad goal to find unique responses to the challenges of COVID-19.
The projects selected will address topics ranging from the impact of COVID-19 on child protection investigations, to how textiles and non-woven materials could be modified to boost protection offered by cloth-based personal protective equipment (PPE). York researchers will also examine transmission of the virus through microdroplets and potential implications for ventilation system design, as well as the role that variations in the genomic sequences of the virus play in infection and disease.
An additional 10 projects will receive a total of $50,000 in seed funding to develop their proposals further in order to attract external funding. In all, more than 150 projects were proposed.
Rhonda L. Lenton
“We have an exceptional community of researchers eager to examine the social and health impacts of this pandemic, and York is proud to provide funding to support this important work,” said Rhonda L. Lenton, president and vice-chancellor. “Our researchers are called to serve the public through exploration and discovery and together with our partners in industry, government and community organizations, we are embracing our role in aiding the world’s recovery from COVID-19.”
Amir Asif
Researchers were asked to submit their proposals in April to a panel of scholars that chose which projects should be funded, to start immediately.
“This was a competitive grant with a time-sensitive deadline, and I would like to thank all applicants and congratulate those chosen to receive funding.Their projects demonstrate York’s exceptional interdisciplinarity and the University’s ability to respond to the unique challenges posed by COVID-19 in these unprecedented times,” said Vice-President Research & Innovation (VPRI) Amir Asif.
Research funding for this important COVID-19 initiative was provided by three areas within the University: the Office of the President provided $100,000; the Office of the Provost and Vice-President Academic contributed $50,000; and the VPRI provided $100,000. Following the number and strength of submissions, the VPRI added $50,000 for seed funding, bringing the total funding to $300,000.
The 10 funded projects are listed below, divided into two categories, with the principal investigators who are leading the research, and funding amount.
Category A – Social Science, Humanities, Education, Arts & Business
Ingrid Veninger, Cinema and Media Arts, School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD), will work with 10 female filmmakers self-isolating in Australia, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Germany and the United States. The filmmakers will produce a 10-minute cinematic “chapter” in response to COVID-19, joining them together in a 100-minute film that is greater than the sum of its parts. ($15,000)
Daniel Kikulwe, School of Social Work, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS), will lead a critical examination asking how Children’s Aid Societies across Ontario are adapting child protection investigation safety interventions, within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, for immigrant and refugee families. ($16,570)
Jinyan Li and Scott Wilkie, Osgoode Hall Law School and Thaddeus Hwong, LA&PS, will evaluate Canadian government support programs, their short-term and permanent impact on the financial health of Canada and lessons from the COVID experience that will assist in developing a fiscal antibody for future emergency responses. ($14,792)
Sue Winton, Faculty of Education, will research how teachers in two school districts, in Alberta and Ontario, enacted online learning policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and examine implications for social inequality. ($19,527)
Aaida Mamuji, Disaster & Emergency Management, School of Administrative Studies, LA&PS, will lead a study on the risks and benefits of contact tracing measures, and establish a foundation for developing guidance mechanisms when digital contact tracing methodologies are deemed a viable solution. ($36,833)
Gertrude Mianda, Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Tubman Institute and Elaine Coburn, International Studies and the Centre for Feminist Research, Glendon, will co-lead a team examining how gender influences the challenges that measures such as social distancing, closure of schools and travel restrictions pose to African immigrant men and women, and how policies and practices could change. ($23,224)
Category B – Health, Science & Engineering
Jennifer Chen, Cora Young and Trevor VandenBoer, Chemistry, Faculty of Science, are researching how to modify textiles and non-woven materials to derive antimicrobial properties that will increase the protection of cloth-based personal protective equipment (PPE). Existing antimicrobial agents present health risks and environmental toxicity, so they will develop methods to incorporate copper for cloth-based PPE. ($44,000)
Marina Freire-Gormaly, Mechanical Engineering, Lassonde School of Engineering, will work with Faizul Mohee, director of research at TMBNEstradosinc, to explore how COVID-19 is transmitted by microdroplets that remain suspended in the air, and the implications for improved HVAC design. ($25,000)
A.M. Viens, Health Policy & Management/Global Health, Faculty of Health, Adèle Cassola, investigator, Global Strategy Lab, Roojin Habibi and Steven Hoffman, Osgoode Law School, Eric Kennedy, LA&PS, are leading an interdisciplinary team mapping and evaluating laws and policies, focusing particularly on emergency powers and restrictive public health measures. The project will catalogue and evaluate legal instruments in terms of law, human rights, and commitments under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Parallel projects are collecting similar data, which will enable researchers to compare the success of different government responses to COVID-19 in jurisdictions worldwide that have similar legal traditions. ($39,800)
Vivian Saridakis, Biology, Faculty of Science, Gillian E. Wu, Faculty of Health, are on a team to investigate the hypothesis that variations in the genomic sequences of the virus may play a pivotal role in geographic differences in rates of COVID-19 infection, transmission and deaths. Using bioinformatics and biochemical approaches, they will analyze the genomic variations and their resulting structural or functional changes, in order to establish the roles of these variations in COVID-19 infection and disease. ($20,000)
Mom genes: What makes a bee brain buzz?
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Small carpenter bees
Small carpenter bees (genus Ceratina)
The extremely common “small carpenter bee” (genus Ceratina) can be found all over the world.
Sandra Rehan, an assistant professor of biology at York University who has dedicated much of her career to studying the species, describes them as “often overlooked,” and a very abundant and critical wild pollinator.
These solitary, typically not aggressive bees couldn’t hurt you with a sting even if they tried – but maybe that’s just the way their mothers raised them.
Sandra Rehan
As the principal investigator at The Rehan Lab @ York, Rehan is directing research into the origins of social behaviour in bees like the small carpenters. By observing the bees in their natural environment (living inside sticks) as well as studying comparative genomics in the laboratory, Rehan and her team of researchers are discovering the vital role mother bees play in the genetic and social development of their young.
“There are genes for behaviour,” Rehan explained. “When an individual (bee) forages, guards or cares for offspring, we are interested in what is underlying each heavily regulated trait.
“In terms of studying the evolution of social behaviour, this bee is extremely useful,” said Rehan, noting that the species operate in a malleable system with both solitary and group roles, that provides opportunities to observe long-term parental care. “Not everyone is doing the same thing all the time, so we can look at differences due to ecological factors but also at differences in real-time gene expression and what underlies these different traits.”
Much of what can be learned about bee behaviour begins by “experimentally modifying the social environment,” as Rehan described it. “You can look at a normal system and not know how it works,” she said. “You have to start testing each component to see.”
Small carpenter bee
Having established a baseline of how the bees behave and which genes react when they do, the researchers attempt to perturb the social system and observe how it, along with the bee’s brain, changes.
The work is based on seminal research involving mice and rats which showed a connection between mothers licking and grooming their offspring and a low-stress, low-anxiety, “normative and tolerant” brain.
“When you take away mom, licking and grooming, they become very anxious, avoidant and aggressive with each other,” Rehan explained. “Not being cared for fundamentally changes their behaviour.”
Intrigued by these findings, Rehan has been testing the theory with populations of small carpenter bees.
“It turns out, they tell the same story,” Rehan said. “We can use these bees to understand effect of maternal care on offspring behaviour.”
This change can be observed easily in the bees’ behaviour when the mother is gone, but in order to see it in gene expression, Rehan and her team need to look at what the bees’ brains look like frozen, literally, in time.
The field aspect of this research involves translocating the bees’ stick habitats for observation, watching individuals interact, and identifying a bee, or bees – in this case, the mother – to remove from the group.
A subject is put in a small container, the kind takeout dipping sauce comes in, where it can be paint marked, measured, examined for wear and then either kept in observation nests for further study or frozen so its brain can be extracted.
Bee brain layer map
Once a bee brain is frozen and removed, Rehan and her team are able to examine thousands of genes regulated under different conditions to determine which genes and regulatory networks are associated with certain social behaviours and their related social environment.
This is how they can see that the presence of a mother has a significant impact on the makeup of a small carpenter bee’s behaviour.
The researchers’ conclusions aren’t just limited to small groups of the species; they also found that the same gene regulatory networks underly both simple and complex societies, suggesting that this kind of “hard wiring” is in place well before the elaboration of queen and workers castes – a foundational finding for this field.
For Rehan, this demonstrates that the presence of a mother and maternal care for an otherwise solitary being is fundamental to accepting a society and wanting to be with kin. She believes that as species develop their social structures, maternal care may be a critical first step.
genus Ceratina
“That could be the golden ticket to understanding how societies evolved,” she said.
Rehan, who joined York in 2019, hopes to continue studying bees from novel perspectives, such as exploring how they are interacting with increasingly urban ecologies, and believes the interdisciplinary nature of her lab positions her researchers to answer complex questions with a collaborative approach.
She noted that, likely due to general concern that bees aren’t doing well, everyday people seem much more interested in bees than they were a decade ago. “They think they are cute, they are important, they want to learn about them,” she said.
While many academics and enthusiasts typically focus their interests on non-native honeybees and pollination systems, Rehan’s lab is unique in specifically studying native species including the small carpenter bees from this perspective.
“There is so much untapped potential,” Rehan said. “It is a unique niche that students come to me to work on. There are so many open questions.”
By Aaron Manton, communications officer, YFile
Welcome to the May 2020 issue of ‘Brainstorm’
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“Brainstorm,” a special edition of YFile publishing on the first Friday of every month, showcases research and innovation at York University. It offers compelling and accessible feature-length stories about the world-leading and policy-relevant work of York’s academics and researchers across all disciplines and Faculties and encompasses both pure and applied research.
Study predicts brain tumour response to therapy, could improve patient outcomes
A York University researcher, who led a team from U of T and Sunnybrook, undertook a study to predict whether a metastatic brain tumour would respond to radiotherapy or not. Early alterations in treatment, based on the prediction, could improve patient outcomes.
Researcher creates practitioners’ resource that supports people with disabilities
A professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science led a study that looked at resources for practitioners to use while working with individuals with disabilities engaging in physical activities. She and her team built an important new tool for these practitioners.
New book on breast cancer shifts narrative away from happy survivor
Interdisciplinary scholar in the health humanities and critical social sciences, creative writer and poet Emilia Nielsen turns conventional breast cancer narratives on their head in a new book that considers the complexity of emotions, including rage, that many women feel associated with this disease.
Launched in January 2017, “Brainstorm” is produced out of the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation in partnership with Communications & Public Affairs; overseen by Megan Mueller, senior manager, research communications; and edited by Jenny Pitt-Clark, YFile editor and Ashley Goodfellow Craig, YFile deputy editor.
New book on breast cancer shifts narrative away from happy survivor
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Professor Emilia Nielsen, from the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, has published a book about breast cancer that tackles the issue in a very different way. Disrupting Breast Cancer Narratives: Stories of Rage and Repair (University of Toronto Press, 2019) explores what she calls the “politically insistent narratives of illness” and refutes the optimism of pink ribbon culture. Instead, she digs deep and investigates the anger around breast cancer; discusses the ways emotion, gender and sexuality become complicated, relational and questioning; and unpacks the culture of disease in a unique way.
Emilia Nielsen and her book. Image reproduced with permission of U of T Press
Nielsen talks with Brainstorm about this new publication, which was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Q: Tell us about the genesis of your new book.
A: This is a revision of my doctoral research, which I defended in 2013. The idea started with my being disturbed about the way that all cancer stories seemed to be so similar. I was curious about the lack of discernible anger attached to breast cancer.
I didn’t want to critique the stories themselves – coming from real women with breast cancer. Instead, I wanted to better understand the conditions through which breast cancer stories emerge. I wondered why we see so many public sharings of happy, positive, hopeful breast cancer stories.
Q: Please expand on the similarities. How did you unearth them?
A: I discovered Judy Segal’s work, published roughly 10 years ago. She critiqued what she called the standard story: “I found a lump – I was scared – I stayed strong – I battled through the treatment – Now I’ve emerged and I’m better than before.”
My antennas went up and I thought: I bet it’s way more complicated than that. This necessitated that I go into illness narrative scholarship, to go beyond the commonly circulated personal stories to examine the cultural politics of breast cancer. Here, you start to see the influence of the corporatization of breast cancer, the marketing of pink ribbon products, the support groups that have a ‘good-vibe-only’ approach, etc.
The mainstream breast cancer narrative of triumph: “I found a lump – I was scared – I stayed strong – I battled through the treatment – Now I’ve emerged and I’m better than before.”
Q: You moved toward a more disruptive narrative?
Audre Lorde’s book, The Cancer Journals (1980). Source: Wikipedia
A: Yes, I sought to look at all those disruptive voices, those stories that are a bit different. Audre Lorde’s book The Cancer Journals (1980) was influential to me here. It was a prophetic text because it urged women to claim all the emotions. I was interested in the angry, sad, despairing stories; the stories that include the examination of the possible environmental causes of cancer; the stories that ask questions.
Hope is a powerful emotion. But it’s made more powerful when combined with anger because anger contains within it the desire to change the structural forces that allow cancer to emerge or for treatments to be difficult. Being angry can allow things to happen.
After I apprehended this, I went about finding these stories from the 1980s to the present day. Allowing space and visibility for disruptive breast cancer narratives has grown, especially in the last five years. I’ve seen a shift, which has been wonderful to witness.
Q: Why is it so important to refute the “tyranny of cheerfulness?”
A: Cheerfulness, which is highly gender socialized [girls = nice], can come with a cost to claiming full emotional experience of the real gravitas of a breast cancer diagnosis. The tyranny of cheerfulness, coined by Samantha King, is really saying: hold your tongue; don’t say that; don’t ask a question. But we’re losing out what it truly means to be diagnosed and treated for cancer. We’re losing valuable information on the patient experience.
What I’ve gleaned from conversations with doctors is that yes, the crying, angry patient is harder to address than the non-crying, non-angry patient. But doctors also want to know the truth of their patient’s experience.
Q: The book’s third chapter contains ‘angry stories.’ Could you tell us a few that stuck out in your mind?
A: Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 essay “Welcome to Cancerland” breaks down the problem with the commodity culture that has emerged around breast cancer, but she doesn’t shield us from her own anger – not at doctors, nurses or cancer survivors, but at the culture we’ve allowed to grow that seems inseparable from the marketplace.
She lets us into her world as she navigates from the first moment when she sits in her doctor’s office, preparing for a mammogram, to biopsy then treatment. It’s a stronger story, a more effective and truthful story, because the anger, which mobilizes her, is so present. It’s not an obstacle to clear thinking; it’s a vehicle.
The tyranny of cheerfulness means we’re losing valuable information on the patient experience. Doctors want to know the truth about these experiences
Q: Your approach is interdisciplinary. Can you tell us about this?
A: I joined York in 2018 in the Health & Society program. I was hired with a specialty in arts, medicine and healing. My approach brings various disciplines together. My goal is to move beyond disciplinary knowledge. I prefer to take a problem and then assemble around that problem methodologies that are most appropriate.
Q: How have you found York University, given its strength in interdisciplinary work?
A: York has an appetite for this kind of work; it’s almost expected that if you’re at York, you’ll be doing something interdisciplinary. When I accepted this job, people said, “Yes, York University, of course that makes a lot of sense.”
At York, I can write a critical-creative paper and also have poetry as a research outcome. At other institutions, something like poetry would be considered as icing on the cake; but at York, research-creation is the cake itself.
To learn more about Research & Innovation at York, follow us at @YUResearch; watch our new video, which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity, such as Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the snapshot infographic, a glimpse of the year’s successes.
By Megan Mueller, senior manager, Research Communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, York University, muellerm@yorku.ca
Researcher creates practitioners’ resource that supports people with disabilities
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People with physical disabilities engage in lower levels of physical activity than the general population and very few engage in sufficient activities to acquire health benefits
This is knowledge translation in action. Faculty of Health Professor Rebecca Bassett-Gunter led a study, in collaboration with others from six Canadian universities (Queen’s University, McMaster University, the University of Waterloo, the University of Alberta, the University of British Columbia and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology) to identify tools and resources for practitioners to use in supporting people with disabilities engaging in physical activity.
Rebecca Bassett-Gunter
In addition to the study itself, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and published in the journal Disability & Heath (2019), the researchers created a catalogue of resources, a new knowledge product, so practitioners could easily find these resources.
“In the study, we were searching for, for example, a manual that would be useful to a physiotherapist to support a client with spinal cord injury to increase his or her physical activity participation. We ended up going beyond the study to build a new catalog of resources for practitioners. We were very excited and pleased to offer this new knowledge product,” Bassett-Gunter explains.
Important because lower levels of activity have health consequences
An expert in physical activity and health promotion, Bassett-Gunter specializes in the psychology of sport and physical activity participation among people living with disabilities.
She wanted to investigate this important research avenue because persons with physical disabilities engage in lower levels of physical activity than the general population and very few engage in sufficient activities to acquire health benefits. “Data suggest that in Canada only three per cent of people with physical disabilities engage in sufficient physical activity, and this can lead to chronic disease, lower levels of community engagement and poorer quality of life,” she emphasizes.
Bassett-Gunter believes there is a need for evidence-informed tactics to promote and support physical activity among people in this population. “Strategies that are directed towards practitioners and service providers in the health, rehabilitation, fitness and recreation domains may be particularly valuable,” she says.
People with physical disabilities engage in lower levels of physical activity than the general population and very few engage in sufficient activities to acquire health benefits
Bassett-Gunter’s team of researchers sought to undertake a systematic scoping review to identify resources that target the training and education of health and recreation practitioners to promote and support leisure time physical activity among persons with physical disabilities. A systematic scoping review seeks to lay out the key concepts underpinning a research area and the main sources and types of evidence available.
These kinds of reviews typically address broad questions. Here, the primary and secondary research questions were:
What are the existing resources that target the training and education of health and recreation practitioners to promote and support physical activity among persons with physical disabilities?
What is the technical quality of existing resources that target the training and education of health and recreation practitioners to promote and support these activities among persons with physical disabilities?
This review included searches of academic and grey literature, online materials and expert consultation. Grey literature refers to materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional or academic publishing and distribution channels. This includes things like annual reports, working papers, government documents, etc.
Results: 46 resources were identified
The review was fruitful: forty-six resources of high technical quality were identified from academic, government, non-government and professional organizations. Most resources were targeted to a specific population of those with physical disabilities (e.g., people with spinal cord injury).
As noted, the paper goes beyond this initial finding to provide a listing of existing resources for practitioners working in these settings.
Bassett-Gunter believes that strategies targeting practitioners and service providers in the health, rehabilitation, fitness, and recreation domains may be particularly valuable
Practitioners give two thumbs up on this new resource
Practitioners were very supportive of this new resource. Registered physiotherapist and clinic manager of Propel Physiotherapy, Sen Hoong Phang, said: “The Supporting Physical Activity among Canadians with Physical Disabilities catalogue is an easy and practical tool to help inform our clients on what the recommended type, frequency and intensity of exercises they could be participating in while living with a disability. From a clinician’s perspective, this catalogue is a savvy, quick access tool, that engages our clients and encourages the discussion of continued physical activity and exercise beyond the walls of the clinic.”
Scott Forrester, manager of Fitness and Recreation, The Steadward Centre for Personal & Physical Achievement, said: “Student volunteers play a key role in helping us deliver innovative physical activity programs for adults, youth and children experiencing disability, yet many of them come to us with little experience. This catalog is a great resource to share with our staff and volunteers so they can find the resources they need to support our participants.”
This work could be a key catalyst for change
The research team hopes this work will be a catalyst for action in further research and practice regarding the analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation of optimally effective resources targeting practitioners to promote and support physical activity among persons with disabilities.
To learn more about Research & Innovation at York, follow us at @YUResearch; watch our new video, which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity, such as Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the snapshot infographic, a glimpse of the year’s successes.
By Megan Mueller, senior manager, Research Communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, York University, muellerm@yorku.ca
Limitless possibilities: Curious Creatures takes VR to a whole new level
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Inside the Alice Lab
The School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD) at York University produces cutting edge research-creation projects that bring together seemingly disparate disciplines – art, mathematics, philosophy, music and virtual reality (VR) – in astonishing ways. With a lab that focuses on “computational worldmaking,” how could it fail to capture imaginations everywhere?
One compelling endeavour is the Curious Creatures project by Sarah Vollmer, a PhD student under the supervision of Professor Graham Wakefield, a core member of VISTA (Vision: Science to Application) and the Canada Research Chair in Interactive Information Visualization. Vollmer was the first digital arts and computer science trainee in the VISTA program.
From left: Sarah Vollmer and Graham Wakefield
Curious Creatures is an interactive VR project, funded by VISTA and the Susan Crocker and John Hunkin Scholarship in the Fine Arts. In this setting, human participants engage in VR environments where they interact with computers in order to, collectively, build the experience.
This project was profiled in the MOCO ’19 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Movement and Computing (October 2019).
Alice Lab
Curious Creatures began in the Alice Lab, directed by Wakefield. This unique space is designed to foster computationally literate art practice in the construction of responsive artificial worlds. It integrates computer graphics, augmented reality, computer vision, complex systems and compiler technology to create novel art and software.
Inside the Alice Lab
Curious Spaces: A creative environment where software can improve itself
Curious Spaces is a project of research in the Alice Lab that explores ways in which software can suggest changes and enhancements to make to itself and accept or reject these changes according to reward functions.
Wakefield underscores that these reward functions do not serve a prior externally specified goal, such as better classifying pictures of animals or genres of music, but rather that these rewards are intrinsic to the artificial agent’s own development. “It’s inspired by human creative and playful processes that have intrinsic rewards, such as discovery, curiosity and self-actualization,” he says.
The objective of Curious Spaces is to pursue new depths of mixed reality human-machine interaction and responsive environments toward a larger goal of intensifying aesthetic experience through meaningful collaborative human-machine interaction over extended durations.
Curious Spaces, in essence, facilitates intricate, fluid or open-ended interchanges between humans and technology. In doing so, it sets up a situation in which artificial realities can display high levels of artificial intelligence.
Virtual environments that make themselves, with human help
Vollmer’s Curious Creatures project, borne in Curious Spaces, is a project of research-creation, which the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council defines as an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation and experimentation.
In this project, sensorial engagement and interactions between a human participant and their VR environment – as both agents of design and agents of collaboration during the creation process – reflect intellectual and emotional decisions encountered throughout the ongoing construction process.
“Whether the experiential moment is augmented, controlled or induced by techniques, such as visual cues, the main motivation is a curiosity-driven fusion of art, science and the technology. Identifying moments that we share and experience daily through collective agency are those that I seek to imitate, create and research-create,” Vollmer explains.
A sample structure created by Curious Creatures, illustrating a design used for testing the construction of a scenario
Compelling process fully immersive
The process and design of this project are compelling. During the coding experimentation, Vollmer worked with CodePen.io, an online hub of coders who build test cases, troubleshoot and find inspiration. “You can erase, rebuild, rearranging the contextual emotions made tangible as you watch it built (rendered) right in front of you,” she states.
To facilitate the building and creation process, a room-scale VR system was used and connected to an enabled browser, such as Google Chrome.
The process is fully immersive: custom built haptic (related to touch) devices can be worn on the participant’s body. This ties the virtual and visual with the physical and tangible – essentially fusing both worlds. Also connected are a set of ManusVR gloves that the participant can use to “touch” within the VR space, enticing curious creatures found within that world to either approach or interact with the participant.
Custom built haptic devices can be worn at different points of a participant’s body
“Graham and I are most excited about this artificial life/nature (a world of curious creatures) arising from the participant’s (a singular curious creature) artistic gestures, and how this living virtual creature-inhabited world may cause us to react and act in ways ‘it’ finds interesting,” she says.
Vollmer sees this project in its infancy, as VR offers limitless dimensions, environments and scenarios for interacting. “The consideration of a more complex personality-matrix and possibly the inclusion of a type of artificial life are beginning to drive my curiosity,” Vollmer says. “By including gesture tracking, unique artistic integration is possible – fluidic paint-like trails can leave the participant’s hands with a life of their own, such as twisting, floating, diffusing and combining into new forms of artificial, yet curious, life.”
Vollmer says that the project has grown into a living space of countless forked paths of questions and attempted answers induced by the exploration of the technical infrastructure available for VR creation. She sees parallels to art, engineering and technology that inspire this curiosity-driven exploration.
Vollmer’s article on the project is available for download. More about Wakefield is available on his Faculty profile page. Additional information on the Alice Lab for Computational Worldmaking can be found on the lab’s website. More about Curious Spaces can also be found on the Alice Lab website.
To learn more about Research & Innovation at York, follow us at @YUResearch; watch our new animated video, which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity, such as Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the snapshot infographic, a glimpse of the year’s successes.
By Megan Mueller, senior manager, Research Communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, York University, muellerm@yorku.ca
Study predicts brain tumour response to therapy, could improve patient outcomes
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For 20 to 40 per cent of patients with cancer, the disease metastasizes to the brain, which can be deadly. A York University researcher, Professor Ali Sadeghi-Naini in the Lassonde School of Engineering, wanted to better the odds. He led a research team whose members were from the University of Toronto, Sunnybrook Research Institute, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the Medical University of Lublin (Poland).
Sadeghi-Naini’s team developed a novel methodology to predict, faster, whether or not a metastatic brain tumour would respond to radiotherapy. This new knowledge could mean that doctors would be able to intervene with adjustments in treatment and ultimately improve patient outcomes. The impact of this research could be profound.
This research could allow doctors to intervene with alterations in treatment that could, ultimately, improve patient outcomes
This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The findings were published in Scientific Reports (2019), a high-impact Nature publication.
Sadeghi-Naini, an expert in quantitative imaging and artificial intelligence (AI) for precision medicine, sits down with Brainstorm to discuss this important study.
Ali Sadeghi-Naini and his quantitative imaging and biomarker laboratory (QUANTIMB Lab)
Q: What were the objectives of your study?
A: Up to 40 per cent of all cancer patients develop brain metastasis. Radiation therapy is an established option for brain metastasis treatment. Unfortunately, up to 20 per cent of brain metastases don’t respond to radiation therapy, which means that the tumour still progresses after treatment.
The objective of this study was to develop non-invasive, quantitative MRI biomarkers that could predict, early, the outcome of local failure in brain metastasis – that is, failure to control tumour progression – after radiotherapy. Our objective was to see whether or not a metastatic brain tumour responds to radiotherapy.
Q: Tell us about the genesis of this project and how you went about undertaking this work.
A: I’m a cross-appointed scientist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. About three years ago, with my colleagues at Sunnybrook, I was discussing the clinical challenges with brain metastases treatment and how quantitative imaging and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques could potentially help therapy outcome prediction that could facilitate tailoring treatment for individual patients with brain metastasis. We were interested in personalizing treatment for patients to achieve better outcomes.
Interestingly, they mentioned that they already had clinical characteristics of more than 100 patients with brain metastasis in a clinical data set at the Odette Cancer Centre at Sunnybrook. So, after our discussion, we decided to retrieve imaging data for these patients and explore possibilities of therapy outcome prediction using these images.
It took over a year to obtain and organize those images. We developed an integrated framework for lesion delineation in these images; we could extract quantitative features describing the shape of the tumour and edema, heterogeneity within different regions of the lesion, etc. In other words, we derived various parameters that describe these tumours quantitatively.
We were looking for imaging biomarkers, the key features that could be used to predict response. We adapted methods of data analytics with AI models to develop biomarkers that can predict response of brain metastasis to radiation therapy.
The binary masks including the tumour delineated by expert oncologists
Q: What were your key findings, and did anything surprise you?
A:The key finding was that non-invasive quantitative MRI biomarkers integrated with machine learning techniques can predict local control versus failure (response versus no response) in brain metastasis after radiation therapy.
The surprising observation was that the majority of the features in the developed quantitative MRI biomarkers were not derived from the tumour itself but from the surrounding regions of the tumour.
This essentially means that the region we should focus on for prediction is mainly the peritumoural area [area around a tumour]. We hypothesized that there are cancerous cells in those surrounding regions, but the number of those cells are not high enough to make an evident contrast on an MRI image. Our methodology quantifies heterogeneity in those regions, characterizing the frequency and distribution of cancerous cells, that could be linked to the outcome of the treatment.
Representative maps of the features in the optimal MRI biomarker. These show the spatial variations in the features derived from the MR images for two representative tumours with the outcome of local control (LC) and local failure (LF) after radiotherapy, respectively
Q: Could you elaborate on the applicability of this research and what this could mean for cancer patients?
A: The patients in this study were followed up to five years after their treatment. We analyzed survival of these patients after their radiation therapy, and found that the patients who were predicted by our model as responders demonstrated significantly better survival rates compared to those predicted as non-responders.
This means our prediction can potentially have an impact on the patient’s survival: treatment adjustments, facilitated by such an early prediction, can potentially improve survival rates and quality of life for cancer patients.
Q: How has York supported your work and, since you came here in 2018, what are your impressions of the University?
A: York provided space for my quantitative imaging and biomarker laboratory (QUANTIMB Lab) at Lassonde. York bolstered my program of research with very good administrative support.
Things that impressed me about York? The multicultural and diverse atmosphere, and the state-of-the-art facilities at Lassonde.
To read the article, visit Scientific Reportswebsite. To read more about Sadeghi-Naini, visit his Faculty profile page.
To learn more about Research & Innovation at York, follow us at @YUResearch; watch our new video, which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity, such as Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the snapshot infographic, a glimpse of the year’s successes.
By Megan Mueller, senior manager, Research Communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, York University, muellerm@yorku.ca
York University Libraries create a new, globally accessible COVID-19 research guide
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Responding with agility to the COVID-19 pandemic, York University’s Dean of Libraries, Joy Kirchner, has spearheaded the production of an innovative new resource that will be of tremendous use for researchers inside and outside of the University, including collaborators and partners across the globe.
“A library-wide effort, this research guide was largely an exercise in capturing to what extent COVID-19 research is available open access (without cost to view),” Andrea Kosavic, associate dean, Digital Engagement and Strategy explains. “That the guide has so much to highlight speaks to a commitment to open access on a global scale, one that York University formalized publicly when the Senate passed our Open Access Policy in June 2019.”
The resource also highlights research available to York community members that is purchased by York University Libraries and available through databases and e-book platforms.
From left: Joy Kirchner and Andrea Kosavic
York University is a leader in this area. “York is committed to disseminating the research performed at the University in ways that make it widely accessible, while protecting the intellectual property rights of its authors,” Kirchner emphasizes. “Opening boundaries to access research could not be more relevant today. The urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic demanded that we get this new resource up and running swiftly.”
The need in the research community is great. “With the plethora of information and research being released around COVID-19, this new resource will be of tremendous use for researchers inside and outside of York, including collaborators and partners across the world,” said then-interim vice-president Research & Innovation Rui Wang. “In response to the pandemic, York has already produced peer-reviewed research in areas like mathematical modelling, social and psychological ramifications of COVID-19, and emergency planning. This new resource will capture all of these efforts in one spot.”
This new resource will be of tremendous use for researchers inside and outside of York, including collaborators and partners across the world
Comprehensive guide, instantly understandable
This guide offers a number of recommendations on main sources to consider when conducting research on COVID-19. Importantly, it is co-authored by Librarians Peter Gorman, Walter Giesbrecht, Rosa Orlandini, John Dupuis and Minglu Wang, with contributions from Dany Savard and Anna St.Onge. It consolidates and draws on international resources compiled by many other librarians, archivists, scholars and others.
The guide is structured into various sections, including:
A featured resource – currently showcasing the COVID-19 Global Health Portal, created by the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research;
COVID-19 databases and publication lists, such as LitCovid, a curated literature hub for tracking up-to-date scientific information about the 2019 novel coronavirus;
COVID-19 and open science, including a resource from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) that looks at how funders, governments, libraries and research communities are advocating for more access to information to support research on COVID-19 through formal calls to action;
COVID-19 and misinformation – essential in this era of fake news;
Public health authorities – public information resources, including the World Health Organization and the Government of Canada; and
Literature Searching, which includes information on the most current PubMed search results in this area, and pre-populated searches on the topic in different databases.
York University has led the way in open access. It is committed to disseminating the research performed at the University in ways that make it widely accessible
Open access policy at York speaks to core values
This new resource reflects York’s dedication to open access, which is embedded in the University’s core values at the highest levels. The Open Access Policy at York supports the advancement of the University Academic Plan (UAP) 2015-2020 priority to advancing exploration, innovation and achievement in scholarship, research and related creative activities, under which a defined outcome is to: “Expand open access to York research in order to enhance visibility, open disciplinary boundaries and facilitate sharing knowledge more freely with the world.”
This policy also responds to the 2016 Plan for the Intensification and Enhancement of Research (PIER) recommendation that “York should develop transparent open access publishing and appropriate research data management policies that are inclusive and reflect the core values of the University.”
Central to operationalizing our commitment to open access at York University is the YorkSpace institutional repository, which serves as a point of aggregation, preservation and dissemination of the work of York researchers. Here, one can find a wealth of resources, including theses and dissertations, prize-winning student works, researcher communities and publications, artistic works, data and learning objects – all preferentially indexed for heightened discovery in Google. YorkSpace is one of over 5,300 repositories worldwide that seek to offer equitable, barrier-free access to research for the general public and researchers alike.
This new resource will be updated on a regular basis.
To see the new resource, visit the website. For more information on York’s open access policy, visit the website and/or read a related YFile story about it. To visit York University Libraries, go to the website.
To learn more about Research & Innovation at York, follow us at @YUResearch; watch our new video, which profiles current research strengths and areas of opportunity, such as Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous futurities; and see the snapshot infographic, a glimpse of the year’s successes.
By Megan Mueller, senior manager, Research Communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, York University, muellerm@yorku.ca
